Broken Houses by artist Ofra Lapid is a series of photographs of small model houses that are made from found photographs. Lapid discovered pictures of abandoned buildings on the internet – she was particularly attracted to a series by a photographer that she keeps anonymous – and then printed them out, pastomg them onto 3D models to recreate the buildings in miniature.

Each house is a surrealistic version of itself – a simultaneously two dimensional and three dimensional piece of art. Lapid created the models out of cardboard cutouts and attached the printed pictures onto them, meaning they both have depth and are as flat as the photograph. The works were created in 2010 and 2011, while Lapid was living in Israel. She told Wired:

I saw them and I was extremely fascinated. It was back when I was still living in Israel, so it was like the other end of the world.For me, the thinking is more a transformation of a place that I am attracted to or that I find fascinating as a place that I want to represent. And how, from an image that I find, or from a memory, or from one place, I transform it into my own image.

Lapid found the photographs online, while she contacted the original photographer, he never replied and may not know what she did with his work. While her series is more about re-appropriation, it does bring attention to the state of many derelict houses in the US.See